Friday, January 28, 2011

We've been doing some tree work over the last two winters and have managed to accumulate a rather large amount of firewood. All of the soft wood (pine, etc.) has been hauled off and only oak and other hardwood remains. If you are local and would like some wood, just send me an email. We're happy to help you load and have a splitter available during working hours. About half of the oak was cut last year so it should be pretty seasoned!

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

I seem to make this promise once every year that I'll continue to post regularly on this blog, and every year I seem to fail. Maybe 2011 will be better!

A lot has happened in the nearly six months since my last post. Today I intend on catching you up on some of the projects we have done since August.

1. Strategic Improvement Plan: For the past several years we have been working with Fine Golf Design, Inc. out of Allentown, Pennsylvania on a "master plan" of sorts to address some recurring issues with our golf course. Mark Fine has collaborated with Scott Witter of Witter Design to come up with a plan to enhance our course in a way that will address some infastructure problems, and will also take our course back to a "classic design" as intended by our original architect, Tom Bendelow. The Strategic Improvement Plan, as we are calling it, addresses three major areas: bunker design and placement, our tree population, and our drainage. In addition to these three major items, it addresses some more subtle changes such as grassing lines, green shape, and tee orientation.

2. Green Expansions: Due to the difficult growing conditions during the summer of 2010, some of the fringes of our greens (primarily Poa annua) succumbed to the heat and needed reseeding. We decided to work with the Strategic Improvement Plan and expand the greens per Mark Fine's design as long as we needed to do some work anyways. Going into the winter we had good germination of the new fringes. As soon as spring "springs" we will get back on the fringes and begin the process of leveling them to the green surface.

3. Winter Work: We are well into the annual refinishing of all of our wooden golf course accessories. With the ample snowfall we have had thus far this winter, we have been able to make good progress on the accessories. Hopefully the winter will cooperate and let us get outside in the next month or so to get some much needed tree work accomplished.

As normally happens this time of year, our staff is getting antsy to get back outside. As a breed, we like to breath fresh air and being cooped up in a shop starts to cause cabin fever. I'll leave you with a shot of Lucy in her favorite spot... eyeing the squirrels. It pretty much sums up how our staff feels also!